RAW Viewer for windows, - for the camera techies Options

[camsmith]

For those of you with Canon or Nikon digital cameras taking phoos in RAW format, Microsoft have released a RAW viewer.


It finally gets thumbnails on to your explorer. Makes it much easier to oraganise the photos.

Click here - but be warned, you need to validate windows to get it.

[james]

You may also be interested in the Adobe DNG format - it's an effort by Adobe to unify the many variations of the RAW format in use by Camera manufacturers into one format - may or may not be of use to you.

Adobe DNG

[camsmith]

Do you convert your Canon stuff to DNG then?

What's the advantage of that over just straight conversion to high-spec JPEG/GIF/TIFF?

[james]

Not from a production perspective yet, but I have played around with the converter.

Advantage over the 3 file format's you mentioned:

GIF - you shouldn't be using GIF for anything other than small graphics with low numbers of component colours for use on the web - it has an adaptive 256 colour palette making it totally unsuitable for full-tone reproduction.

JPEG - it's lossy - at highest quality / lowest compression settings it's not overly noticeable on all but the most extreme images, but whichever way you cut it some data has been hocked to make the file smaller.

TIFF - a 24bit (or 32bit) TIFF will be bigger than an equivalent RAW or DNG file (in terms of disk space) with a lower gamut (normally)

and advantages of RAW or DNG over all of the above:
Broader data (normally 12 bits from each sensor/filtered layer) allows for more adjustment (white balance, colour temperature, exposure) etc, they are free from in-camera processing (USM, other kinds of sharpening and WB/CT data) which allow more flexibility for adjusting the image 'in post' with less quality issues.

I like the idea of DNG (or any open standard) over RAW purely because as is so often the case - 'the good thing about standards is there are so many to choose from'.

Once the images have been post-processed it would be fine to store them as TIFF's (or max quality JPG's for archive/backup purposes), but the ability to go back to the 'raw' files and tweak things at a later date is nice.

[camsmith]

Cool, thanks for that.

I've mostly been using the highest JPEG lately, but some fo the more professional stuff I've taken has been in RAW, and then processed into JPEG as you've mentioned.

Handy to know the difference though. Thanks for that.

[james]

No problemo - what software are you using to process your RAW files?

[camsmith]

The basic Canon one. Not overly impressive, but I haven't done much playing yet. Haven't even turned off camera adjustments (e.g. sharpness) yet.

Taking decent photos though.

[james]

What camera?

[camsmith]

300D - three lenses covering 17-300 zoom (although the 300 lens is a bit slow on the focussing to use in faster sports), carried over from my old EOS film camera.